Google appoints Turkish engineer as AI division senior vice president

US tech giant Google reshuffled the senior leadership of its artificial intelligence (AI) division, Google DeepMind, with the appointment of Turkish engineer Koray Kavukcuoglu as its senior vice president.

Sundar Pichai, CEO of Alphabet, Google’s parent company, announced the changes in a recent post on US social media platform X.

Pichai stated on Wednesday that Kavukcuoglu, who had been serving as the division’s chief technology officer and chief AI architect, will assume the role of senior vice president and be responsible for model development, cutting-edge AI research, Gemini, and developer teams.

“Koray has been at GDM (Google DeepMind) for 13 years and is a world-renowned expert in the field, starting our deep learning team and driving breakthroughs like WaveNet & DQN (Deep Q-Network),” he said. “GDM is in great hands!”

He said that Demis Hassabis, one of the founders of Google DeepMind, will serve as chair of the division’s board and as chief scientist at Alphabet, while continuing to lead Isomorphic Labs.

Pichai added that Hassabis will focus on “shaping the future of AGI (artificial general intelligence) and scientific discovery,” which Alphabet considers highly important to the company and humanity as a whole.